Columns:: UGA cannot use race in making admissions decisions, court rules

since 12/15/98

Columns::September 4, 2001

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UGA cannot use race in making admissions decisions, court rules

By Tom Jackson
tjackson@uga.edu

The board of regents and University of Georgia have three weeks to decide whether to appeal an Aug. 27 federal court ruling striking down the university’s use of race as one of several factors in a small portion of its admissions considerations. Before a decision is announced, President Michael F. Adams plans in-depth consultation with legal counsel and with the chancellor, the governor and other state leaders who have strongly supported the university’s defense of its admissions policy.
“Sometimes you are defined by the battles in which you engage rather than by those you win,” Adams said in a printed statement released the day of the ruling. “We certainly respect the court, but may have a differing opinion about whether the university’s admissions program is ‘narrowly tailored.’ ”
The board of regents is the named defendant in the suit filed by three white females who were denied admission for the class entering in fall 1999. The regents must decide whether to appeal to the full 11th Circuit Court of 12 judges and then to the U.S. Supreme Court.
Approximately 90 percent of the school’s freshmen each year are admitted on the basis of high school grades and SAT or ACT scores, with the remainder being decided through a “Total Student Index” system of weighted factors.
The opinion called UGA’s policy of providing extra weight to certain groups in the final admissions process “rigid and incomplete” and added, “the benefit it awards each and every nonwhite applicant is wholly, and concededly, arbitrary. If a university cannot even articulate a basis for the amount of numerical bonus it awards nonwhite candidates, then it has no right to award such a bonus.”
The university suspended use of the race factor beginning in fall 2000 pending the ultimate outcome of the court case. A week ago, preliminary figures indicated that, even without the factor, redoubled efforts to attract minority students to campus apparently have helped UGA avoid the sharp downturn in minority enrollments experienced in other states with highly publicized lawsuits and public debate over affirmative action. While the number of new African-American freshmen was down 48 from a year ago as of Aug. 15, numbers of new African-American graduate, professional and transfer students were up, for a net gain of one overall, to 441.
The Georgia case, watched nationwide as a landmark in attempts to maintain affirmative action in higher education admissions, has drawn widespread news coverage from such outlets as the New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, USA Today, Chicago Tribune, Philadelphia Inquirer, Miami Herald--virtually every major metropolitan newspaper.

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